I get to do a lot of fun things for the Museum. I recently got the chance to attend a Maker BBQ hosted by Hive Pittsburgh which is part of the Kids + Creativity Network. I spent a night at Pittsburgh’s Tech Shop hanging out with a bunch of teenagers. Everyone involved was teaching or demonstrating something digital: 3D modeling, programming etc. I decided to bring along some computers and let kids play with SC

The Braddock Library is an amazing place. The building is beautiful, the staff is extremely friendly and the patrons are awesome. I was lucky enough to visit the library twice this summer and teach two workshops: one woodworking and one electronics. The woodworking workshop had about twenty kids participate and all of them created something original. One girl simply spent a half and hour sawing a huge board in ha

The third Pittsburgh Mini-Maker Faire was held in September here at the Museum, presented with HackPGH. As always, it was a lot of fun. I spent most of my time in MAKESHOP drawing with robots and teaching people how to solder. But I did get a chance to see all of the fun inventions and ideas that the makers were presenting. There was a really neat frisbee throwing robot that always had willing participants to ca

Christian built a pinball machine… Well, he built a box with a ramp out of pegboard. The rest of our staff really helped turn it into a full-fledged pinball machine. We encouraged visitors to add their own obstacles, ramps, scoring systems, etc. This open-source pinball machine is my favorite new toy in MAKESHOP (sorry laser cutter). The additions to it are endless. The way the machine encourages trial and err

As usual we are always prototyping or experimenting with something new (or old) in MAKESHOP. This particular day we decided to continue our exploration of magnets. Magnets are something that really seems to intrigue the entire staff of MAKESHOP. I found some plastic tanks in the basement and decided to them to create some new magnetic prototypes. We tried to create a circuit puzzle that required you to use a magne

How do you make a board game? All you really need is a table, pencils, a stack of paper and your imagination. A couple of weeks ago we allowed visitors to play and add to a simple board game that we started. The end result was amazing…And really challenging. Most of the rules forced you to do some sort of physical challenge… …Or made you go back to start. The open-ended nature of the